Sex Workers' Group Challenges California Prostitution Law

Receive the latest local updates in your inbox

A lawyer for a sex workers' advocacy group asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco Thursday to overturn a 145-year-old California law that criminalizes prostitution.

"I believe people in this country have the right to act this way and to make a living this way," attorney Louis Sirkin told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sirkin, a First Amendment free-speech attorney from Cincinnati, represents the San Francisco-based Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project in a federal lawsuit filed in 2015 to challenge the law.

The plaintiffs also include three unidentified former prostitutes and a disabled man who says he wants to be a respectful client of erotic services.

"Why is it illegal to sell something that it's legal to give away?" he asked Deputy California Attorney General Sharon O'Grady.

O'Grady, defending the law, argued that the Legislature had a rational basis for criminalizing commercial sex to deter violence against women, sex trafficking, drug use and transmission of sexual diseases.

Bea also questioned Sirkin when he sought to cite a landmark U.S. Supreme Court gay-rights ruling, Lawrence v. Texas of 2003, as support for the appeal.

In the Lawrence case, the court by a 6-3 vote struck down a Texas sodomy law, saying that consensual sexual conduct was part of the "personal and private life of the individual" protected by the due process liberty right.

Bea asked, "What is the interest protected by due process? The conduct or the relationship?"

"I believe it is the conduct. We have voluntary individuals who want to engage in sexual activity," Sirkin answered.

Judge Jane Restani, a visiting U.S. Court of International Trade judge temporarily assigned to the appeals court, suggested that the Lawrence decision concerned "how to conduct private lives" rather than brief sexual encounters.

O'Grady said, "The state is not telling anyone who they can sleep with," but argued that banning commercial sex is "an easy place to draw the line" to protect against violence, drug use and trafficking.